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On Melinda Tankard Reist’s websiteis this post by Nicole Jameson titled ‘The up-skirting of Anne Hathaway.” Jameson is an activist in Tankard Reist’s Collective Shout, the organisation that churns out on-line petitions against retailers, the music industry and various other companies and individuals who they feel are sexifying, pornifying and exploiting girls and women with their merchandise.

Jameson’s piece morally critiques paparazzi who apparently got a shot of Hathaway’s genitalia as she exited her limousine wearing no knickers. The shot went viral. Of course it did. This is, I gather, an abuse of Hathaway’s human right to go about her business sans her undies if she feels like it.

Personally, I could care less, however what is interesting in this piece is the following statement by Jameson:

‘The violation of Anne Hathaway’s privacy was repeated by every media outlet and media consumer who circulated or viewed her picture and by every writer or commenter who gave the peeping Tom cameraman a free pass by turning the focus away from his harassment”

I’m astonished to find such a statement on Tankard Reist’s website. After all, this is the woman who, in an explosion of incandescent outrage against French Vogue not only republished photos of children she alleged were pornographic and sexualised, but linked to the source so we could see more of them.

The point of the post is to cause outrage in readers at these sexualised images of little girls. In order to do that, I suppose their argument goes, readers have to be able to see them.

But there’s something awry about this reasoning. You don’t want these images viewed, you think it’s wrong that they are readily available in the media, and yet you reproduce them on the Internet to make a point?

You disseminate these images yourself, while at the same time railing against their publication in other arenas?

What is going on here?

On the face of it, it would seem Tankard Reist has double standards. It is fine for her to reproduce images of little girls she considers pornographic and sexualised. It is not fine, however, for other outlets to reproduce them. If the images are of an adult celebrity’s genitalia, reproduction of the photos is a violation of her privacy and every instance perpetuates that violation. Yet Tankard Reist apparently did not violate the privacy of those little girls? Or maybe she just did it in a good cause?

Girlfriend is a magazine for 12 to 17 year olds that as well as offering beauty and fashion advice, takes on issues such as bullying, and self-respect. They have also launched a green campaign aimed at informing girls and young women about global warming.

The results of the Girlfriend survey would seem to undermine Tankard Reist’s moral panic about our “pornified” culture forcing our girls into acting as “sexual service stations” for the gratification of boys and men.

The reasons given by the young respondents for refraining from sexual activity are as follows:

Waiting to be in love (56%)

Not wanting to have sex (37%)

Feeling too young (31%)

No particular reason (26%)

Waiting to be married (17%)

Waiting to be the legal age of consent (14%)

Waiting for their boyfriend/girlfriend to be ready (8%)

Not being interest in ever having sex (1%)

These reasons don’t seem wildly different from reasons my generation might have given had we lived in an era when it was acceptable for magazines to conduct such surveys, or indeed, in an era when reading material such as Girlfriend was available in the first place.

Tankard Reist says she finds these results “revealing,” but revealing of what? After years of claiming that society has gone to the pornification dogs, breeding boys who become (according to her colleague Gail Dines) “amoral life support systems for an erect penis” and girls who are inevitably forced into exploitative sex long before they are ready, the Girlfriend survey would seem to indicate that things are pretty much as they have long been, and 75% of girls have the strength and self-respect to resist the demands of (100%?) brutalized males for self-gratifying sex.

Of course it would be better if 100% of girls were comfortable enough with themselves to tell the amoral life support systems to take their erect penises and sod off. But I am willing to bet the reasons they are unable to do this are to do with many complexities, not simply Diva selling Playboy bracelets or Spotlight flogging Playboy pillowcases, or even Kanye West making videos of women done up as corpses.

That so many of them are hanging out to be “in love” might be an issue, depending on just what girls and young women understand by that term.

Sounds like more from the, ‘This is the most salacious thing I’ve ever seen; let’s roll that tape one more time!’ crowd.

People who are determined to be offended on behalf of children always seem to sit uneasy with me. Isn’t this a type of ‘grooming’ behaviour as well, whilst claiming to be so interested in the sexual development of children?

Although it may not be as harmful as a genuine sexual predator, there is a real damage to children done by people like MTR who seem to think that its a mental illness to develop a sexual identity outside of a marital bedroom.

I saw the Hathaway photo. You can’t see her vagina, all you see is the upper section of her pubic hair, no vulva. Hathaway’s reaction was more embarrassment at having made such an obvious mistake. She knows she should have known the paps love an upskirt and would be waiting. Which only makes some cynical that some celebs do it deliberately to get attention.

But MTR a hypocrite? Well, knock me over with a feather. The best thing that could have happened was for no one to care about Hathaway’s brief flash of pubes. But there’s Jameson writing about how writers shouldn’t give it oxygen, thus giving it oxygen.

Meanwhile I’ve been reading ‘Child Pornography and Sexual Grooming’ by legal academic Suzanne Ost, who states quite clearly that those who draw attention to the supposed sexualisation of children participate in the sexualisation process.

“Our construction and objectification of children as innocent may cause us to reduce them simply to objects of innocence, the one aspect of childhood that may be of the greatest attraction to the child sexual abuser.”

I agree with the Suzanne Ost quote. I haven’t seen the Hathaway photos, but after a discussion with a Twitter friend I changed vagina to genitalia. I used vagina only because that was in Jameson’s piece. I wonder why Jameson used it? Drama?

Yes, probably drama, and because she’s commenting on a photo she hasn’t seen. It really is a non event – a hint of pubes, that’s all. No pink bits. I think Hathaway handled the whole thing very well. She didn’t apologise for being caught without underwear, she just shrugged it off. She’s right that all the blame lies with the paps who position themselves to catch women getting out of cars in order to shoot an upskirt, underwear or not. Many female celebs have been thus entrapped.

Maybe, if these BACWAs are so outraged they could draw attention to sexualisation by dressing up as slutty dolls and ,oh wait……

Looks like it’s time for another petition…….

Perhaps Hathaway and all the other flashers need to go with some sort of product placement when they dress?
Or perhaps do as the BACWAs would do,dress with no skin visible anywhere from any angle…oh wait….

Tankard Reist is a self-important siren from whom noise emanates whether or not an issue exists. And of course she exercises double standards. It’s a common human frailty and curiously enough all but ubiquitous among “morals” campaigners who fear that society is not as frightened as they are (of shadows, naturally). The best thing to do with the Tankard Reists of this world is to ignore them. The same could be said of the Anne Hathaways who apparently believe a knickerless woman can slide out of a vehicle without flashing. Still, the sum of human knowledge has been increased by this incident. We now have confirmation that Hathaway is not Brazilian.😉

So because I think it matters what Anne Hathaway actually thought about the incident I Googled this…she deals with it rather well, and not at all like somebody who could be accused of creating a publicity stunt.

I’m glad she has a vagina, but I guess we sort of expected there was one. It might have been shocking if something else had taken its place. Who knows what? However, even if it was a publicity stunt my question would have been essentially the same. What’s the big deal? And not just in the throwaway line sense of asking either… I mean I really don’t want to be nude in front of others, but nor do I begin to understand our obsession with objecting to minor titillation such as this. I mean to say that I get what the titillation is caused by, I just don’t know why a certain class of hypocrite sees the need to deny it by way of their stupid confected offence at the entirely expected presence of a woman’s genitals.

As for kids with what see like more or less healthy attitudes to sexuality I’m a little surprised that the magazine managed to conduct a survey that might actually be somewhat balanced and reasonable. If we’re to be lead to believe that any such poll isn’t skewed by teenagers lying through their teeth about sex as was more often than not the case when I was their age, then maybe we’ve achieved something of a level of openness in their generation that we ought to be more pleased about…. Or should we?

Of course the above could be just my interpretation of an otherwise fairly meaningless survey, taken in a far from scientifically relevant setting. As is MTR’s an attempt to project her negative prejudices onto the figures, because that’s just what she does. Please feel free to see through all of it for the distorted sexual politics that it obviously is.

Hudson, Hathaway did answer rather well; but she fudges the issue. It might be sad that low-life snappers hang around hoping to snag a genital or two and make money, but heck, that’s the reality. She’s perfectly entitled to leave her knickers at home if she wants, too, but she can hardly be surprised or even disappointed if her up-skirt revelation then appears in the media.

I don’t suppose you’re far off the mark if just being aware of the zeitgeist towards propriety in Western societies counts for anything. But that wasn’t really my point today.

Rather I thought it pertinent to question whether the objection to titillation mattered. So that if you didn’t take away the titillation but dispensed with the objection to it, then that zeitgeist would nonetheless shift as a result.

Whether that means the titillation factor would consequentially diminish as well I’m not so sure, but I suspect that at some point in time when we decided to more or less delimit female modesty with the three triangles of a modern thong bikini, further reduced to just the one small hidden pubic patch on many topless beaches then we’d pretty well run out of objections to all but actual nudity. So that the war of attrition over women’s bodies that has the wearing of burqas as its opposite extreme finally gets reduced to the basic question…what were we originally trying to hide from and why?

The entire point of the phrase is that critics may carp and howl but nothing stops the progress of the caravan, the procession, the cavalcade, what you will. The caravan moves on to its destination, despite the yapping dogs.

I know what you mean Jennifer and it is something on a conundrum. I’ve always felt similarly ill at ease in the moment of regarding a woman’s beauty on a beach. It is something one wants to enjoy surreptitiously is it not? Whether out of the need to resist becoming that unthinking life support system for a rampant phallus that you mentioned, or because I’m aware of that point where a gaze becomes an ogle that causes the recipient discomfort, I don’t know…

But in the less fixed aspect of how we have come to regard the sight of children as tainted in recent years I am less equivocal. It happens to me rarely but on one occasion I remember with particular sadness. On holiday in Broome watching the Aboriginal kids play a game of football so beautifully and knowing I could not politely linger indefinitely despite very much wanting to. I resented the reasons of race and of those suspicions that might these days fall upon anyone who regards a group of children no matter how innocently. And I resent those things more deeply because I don’t think they need to exist, that they’re unhealthy and somehow pitiful. But most of all because I was then a victim of my own interpretation of propriety when it comes to these things, and it is an impression I feel sure is imposed from without and not engendered from within ourselves.

We get things wrong when it comes to fearing certain things and difficult as it is to put our fingers on them I nevertheless feel like we must if we’re honest at least try to exorcise those demons the likes of MTR would have us bow down to.

Well your parting line interests me because few enough people tend to realise that Michelangelo was a contemporary of Henry VIII, John Calvin and Martin Luther. He was also working for Pope Leo X at time when indulgences the reformation so objected to were funding papal wars and outrageous extravagances.

Let’s just say that as comparisons go the church of Michelangelo’s day had far more wrong with it than MTR and her motley cadre deign to crook a pontificating finger at today.

The fact that they nonetheless are inclined towards religiosity on the one hand and restrictive attitudes towards sexuality on the other begs the obvious question as to why they don’t concern themselves with clerical child abuse rather than smutty magazines and the like?

Only if they don’t want them, DQ, I meant. I’m assuming girls don’t usually want to engage with an “amoral life support system for a penis.” Which is different from consensual sex with somebody you fancy.

I guess when the BACWAs can get ‘schoolies’ (the cornupcopia of teen pornucopia) successfully and completely shut down they will gain some credibility, as being ‘possibly’ consistent.Surely by remaining silent every ‘schoolies’ season is monumentally hypocritical?
There’s this giant, overtly youth-targeted industry, exploiting teens across the nation, and one which generates millions of dollars,especially in QLD, (that zany adventure land where voting will soon be democratically and surgically removed by the next wave of pumpkin sconers)
They (CS) cherry-pick the easy targets,over and over again.According to their (CS) standards and morals, how is the ‘schoolies’ scenario less harmful than a T-Shirt with a soft porn image (at worst) or a completely gnaff imaginary lyric in a pop song.(Perhaps they missed the Boomtown Rats?) And where is their proof that either scenario has ever ‘directly’ caused or inspired direct harm?

Come on Collective Shout, see how the youth who are ‘schoolies’ react to you having ago at removing what they obviously see as THEIR rite of passage.
See how those profiting, react to your genuine concern when you shut down what is often seen (but seldom discussed by the Women / Girl Industry), as the end of year binge-drinking, hump fest.

CS could start by the usual means.Outrage by petition.

Perhaps a name change is in order?
Selective Snout ??
BTW Have any of the members of Collective Shout signed or generated a petition (yet) calling for an end to religious org child abuse and the cover-ups,thereof)?
Were they integral in the setting up of the Royal Commission?
Or are they far to busy vacillating about blurry shots of Hollywood snatch?
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I can’t get excited about Hathaway’s ‘pantylessness’, but I was horrified by what i saw in Woolies today;a young mum with two daughters, maybe six and eight, the eight year old was wearing pink sandals that had about eight cm high heels,poor thing could hardly walk….
I don’t care about someone viewing it as sexy; I was worried about her falling and breaking something, about her poor feet, about her posture….

You really have some dumb mums…. maybe for someone else she was a yammy mummy 🙂

Well JW,
I guess society needs to ask,
“Why is their priority skewed in such a way that there is a very stark (some would say UNAVOIDABLE) perception that the priority should be to ignore the reality (LOUD and SIGNIFICANT institutionalised sex assaults on vulnerable children) and instead attack the projected (infinitesimal /insignificant) possibility of a young (cognisant/intelligent/aware) person/s choosing their own sexual destiny instead.”( the way most people have safely evolved.)
I think people (lobbyists) who continue to create personal illusions should have zero access to policy design.
Further I think our elected reps need to clearly and PUBLICLY walk away from such opportunistic social-engineering, especially when it is obviously motivated by the demands and standards of a minority of distinctly religious, or even pseudo-religious shop fronts.
(Albeit camouflaged in many cases)
But then, we all know how shallow and desperate today’s vote chasers are.Much like ambulance chasers, in many,many ways.

“Many Muslim women are led to believe that if they are not part of a certain “category” of women then they are ‘safe’ from being raped : Women and girls of all ages, classes, culture, ability, sexuality, race and faith are raped.

Attractiveness has little significance. In fact, reports show that there is a great diversity in the way targeted women act, look or dress. Rapists do not choose women based on whether they are wearing a burqa [or not] or dressed “modestly” [or not]. Rapists choose women based on their vulnerability, not their physical appearance .

It is also important to acknowledge that “random” rapes by strangers account for less than 20% of all rapes. More than 80% of rapes are committed by men that were KNOWN to the woman. ”

(unquote)

This excellent summary is just a part of an even more excellent analysis to be found at :

Not sure about all that.
Different strokes.I have zero problem with Burqas etc.
I have big probs with people using the same old stereotyping to justify racist attitudes and see burqa wearing as one of them opportunities.Hoodies should be banned before burqas IMO.Racists use any excuse to attack and ban.That is where they have something in common with BACWAs, I guess.

Racists? And here I am thinking the burqa was a mark of a woman’s ‘religious’ commitment and that Muslim women of all races choose to wear them.

Truth is, the style of Islamic head dress will generally tell you which sect the woman follows. The more that is covered, the stricter the sect.

If she is voluntarily wearing a burka, or niqab, this woman is telling you she is a fundamentalist. And if she is a fundamentalist then she is not a good person. She is telling you she accepts the idea that men have no control and that rape is a woman’s fault; that women are temptresses.

The fact is the choice has nothing to do with culture/race and everything to do with religion.

People(racists) constantly use the argument about whether women wearing burqas is oppressive,a disguise for would be suicide bombers or arrogant Arab’s refusing to ‘toe’ the WASP line, and donning our preferred attire.
That to me is Racist,racist,racist.

Genuine concerns are to be taken seriously.A pity they are drowning in gutless racism most of the time.Take it or leave it.
DILLIGAF from me whether you or anyone else sees it differently.
I know a walking duck when I see one.And the anti-burqa bandwagon jumpers, are mainly racists.
There are (millions) people who would gladly endorse an anti Muslim immigration policy here based simply on their own ignorant basal racism.Fact.
Another day another non WASP football,another denial,AFAIK.

Repeat there are racists who use faux concern for any number of Islamic traditions,and at the end of the day their last act would be to ban Mosques and religious gatherings.And then it’s time to tweak the WAP all over again.
Barnaby Joyce hinted that very thing yesterday when he commented about the Joh Bejelke Petersen ‘beyond death’ brigades idea to drop compulsory voting.

I simply don’t buy than any significant number of Aussies care for releasing women in burqas or any other dress.They just simply want them in some other country,full stop.

I am dead happy to see and hear a debate about female Islamic (or any other) oppression,but pardon me if I check the previous principles and history of the ones who hold the megaphones.

Because a dickhead racist criticises the hijab/niqab/burka/jilwa doesn’t necessarily make it a racist argument per se.

You are in danger of tolerating a different kind of intolerance. The kind that says WASP intolerance is intolerable, but the intolerance of the ‘other’ must be accepted.

The wearing of the niqab is a political/religious statement. I am not as much concerned by the symbol as the message itself.

I will not be drawn into all your other comparisons, which are irrelevant.

The niqab is not a quaint custom. When a Muslim woman chooses to wear it she is saying Western women are sluts. It is a statement about the appropriate level of modesty. And to wear it in public is to tell every other woman who passes that the wearer is better, more moral and purer and they are lesser, sluttier, immoral.

Either that, or she is wearing it because her husband or male relatives have pressured her to do so.

And if you are so concerned about the principles and history of those who hold the megaphone, then look at the principles and history of the sects that so aggressively advocate wearing the burka/niqab.

For my part I am resolutely anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist. The burka/niqab is a kind of uniform and it tells me the wearer is an authoritarian theocrat who would replace democracy with sharia.

And that is most definitely a real threat.

Thing is that I know that the burka/niqab clad woman doesn’t actually believe in freedom of dress at all, because it is a statement about modesty and western sluts. I know that such a woman would support laws pressuring women to cover up.

It may well be said that neither the burqa nor the bikini represent pinnacles of human flourishing that everyone would choose for themselves. So obviously it would be wrong to coerce women in either direction. Yet why would it not be equally obvious that to coerce women away from that direction is an ideological act of the utmost narrow mindedness to rival the very worst doctrines that religious zealots have to offer?

Curiously, I have encountered Naturist women who say that going naked liberates them from having to appear sexy and that Naturists do not ogle women.

However, if a woman chooses to wear the burqa or niqab she is accepting a false ideology, and I will say so. Truth is there is little real choice. Unless they live outside a Muslim country, she will not have the choice to wear a bikini.

Oh I agree, but if the real problem with Muslim societies and dress codes involves men’s attitudes then calls to ban the burqa stray into two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right territory. I see women being forced by one group of men to dress one way in their homelands being just as bad as immigrating to supposedly freer country only to find they’re effectively forced to dress as that society dictates. The quotient of women’s freedom to dress as they prefer is not increased by this.

The freedom to dress as one wishes is a red herring. The burka/niqab is the symbol of an idea. It is the idea that is wrong and must be challenged.

And do not forget how much women pressure other women to conform.

Do you think that a niqab wearing mother would support her daughter’s choice to become a lesbian nudist?

“Why yes, sweetheart, wear slutty clothes, because I believe in true freedom of choice and my choice to wear the niqab was just a personal fashion choice that does not reflect my deeply held religious beliefs.”

Any idea that is wrong should be challenged, but the thing about ideas is that they’re either persuasive or they aren’t. Even if, as I said the task of challenging either burqa or bikini involves convincing a group of men as much as it does women, then imposition of wills by force is a retrograde solution. What we know of such conflicts is that they can stiffen people’s resolve to resist change as in cases where persecution is claimed.

My view of what probably works against such an act of obvious non-conformance to social norms in our society is to simply ignore that it even exists thereby undermining any sense of relevance it might have carried to begin with. After a generation or so people will want to blend in and the perceived problem will subside. It might eventually emerge that the idea became unpersuasive and died a natural death.

Look also if you will more deeply at the case of the would-be lesbian nudist whose traditionally minded Muslim mother would be at odds with her choices. How do you think it would affect their relationship, even if the unlikely assent was granted? I wonder if that situation isn’t better negotiated between the two women with a little less confrontation and a little more latitude for their lifestyles to diverge without necessarily becoming that source of direct conflict that some people tend to presume has to exist.

From what little I know of honour killings it seems like the most sensational and extreme cases distract us from the level at which some societies tolerate femicide for reasons that are almost mundane by comparison, but to our way of thinking no less inexcusable. Yet among immigrants who’ve escaped such repressive societies, where arranged marriages and abject subjugation of women are commonplace, I don’t think the mere visible symbol of the headscarf is nearly as problematic for them as it seems to be for intolerant Westerners.

What I think we may be seeing in episodic incidences of Muslim intolerance among immigrant populations has more to do with cultural dislocation and the death throes of theocratic control over the community than it does with what the majority are doing with their lives. The likelihood is that as people realise that they have options outside of religious stricture and choose in larger numbers to leave their churches then what is left are the hard-liners who fewer ordinary cultural Muslims want any more to do with than do cultural Christians these days with fundamentalists or the institutions that brutalised them in their childhoods. So as a result there are I suspect surprisingly few Muslims who’d support some of the figures the mainstream media habitually looks to for a newsworthy comment, just as a lot of nominal Catholics are regularly at odds with the views of Pell, Ratzinger et al.

We’ve leapt from an imaginary hard nosed totally oppressed mother, to having the lesbian nudist daughter pretty much snuffed out by the Taliban hitmen.
Not bad work considering the sum total of us who know and understand what it is like to be a Muslim woman here or in another country is not much more than a budgie dropping,really.
I’ll sign off where I came in.What I DO know is I live in a country where xenophobia and racism are a politicians best friend when it comes to grabbing votes, as the wagons (willingly and enthusiastically) tighten the circle and the media joins in to whistle the dogs.And as I said when the WASPs win the burqa battle, they’ll move on to telling the local council a Mosque is a brooder for terrorists.And beyond.

I agree and I so deeply resent the kind of bigotry those dog whistle politics play to that sometimes I need to take a step back from the can’t-tolerate-intolerance trap.

Having gone this far with Ray’s by now overburdened example I’m aware that the lesbian nudist might be someone who resents my interference no matter how well intended. Should I fail to persuade her mother then I have probably made matters worse. Am I by saying it’ll work out in a generation or so condemning her generation to be the one that misses out on the benefits of Australia’s much lauded freedoms? And what if I mean to help her but in the process ruin her relationship with her mother. Sometimes such relationships are tolerable only so long as outsiders are not party to the strain of a family’s private struggle to bridge the gulf between tradition and the freedom to be oneself.

There is concern then that we do well by these least of our citizens who came as immigrants, but if win-win situations are not always possible then just stating the perspective that you would prefer to be true is tantamount to an act of utter callousness. No, we don’t know how they feel, it could be one or all of the above, and it wouldn’t hurt to consider those possibilities, and maybe even to ask.

Jenny’s post is a written version of a clip round the ear for romancing.
How can a Mills and Boon approach to life really inform young people of real issues when they are commodifying them, although not in the simplistic way the moral right claims?
I know it’s not true of course. Just so long as we know your thong is made by the sponsor and you have the latest fashion, why, you are set to argue the toss on anything.
Never mind, they did the same thing with my generation, pop culture etc.

As for the Anne Hathaway stunt, don’t tell me its anything other than that.
She just happens not to be wearing her knickers and the snapper just happens to be there?
Btw, what is this modern tendency amongst women, not to wear knickers?
I did read some bs from Jennifer Hawkins that it;s about some thing called a “panty-line” and it seems an odd thing to worry about, whether there is an outline for your knickers against a skirt or slacks and it does have one wonder as to the likelihood of a far more dangerous threat, a chill.

Well, Ray,
Remember the Sunday school lesson about the good Samaritan?

Obviously if you were walking (on all 3) down the street (fully turgid) dressed in your Buddy Franklin T Shirt, obliviously listening to Brian McFadden rape songs on your Mp3 player, (insert trendy brand name here) lurking dangerously by a sexually exploitative billboard, and pulsatingly lethal, (as all men {potentially?} are), and then (tragically but some would say hahahahahaha) you were to suddenly go unconscious, as your worthless blood flowed to your manly hymen-oriented, Virgin destroying come-cannon, and a BACWA / BINT came along she/they would check that you were wearing some (religiously approved) restrictive (very restrictive) Y-fronts, (because all penises are bad and must be suitably compounded, when not in a monogamous/marital/breeding mechanically functioning,Missionary position.)
And obviously, if you were single AND going commando, they would obviously (again) leave you by the side of the road to…… (insert outcome here).

Jennifer just out of interest after following the link the the article about Girlfriend magazine that MTR had re-blogged I checked out the original and upon finding the website http://www.generationnext.com.au looked into that.

Whois tells me that it’s a creation of a company called Healthed Pty Ltd and put up by an individual called Remesh Manocha who appears to be some kind of meditation practitioner among other things his main site http://www.healthed.com.au seems to be basically selling tickets to conferences the one of most interest being called Wellbeing for Young People that’s doing the rounds of capital cities in May this year, and is associated with the generation next website. MTR will be one of the speakers.

I’d not heard of any of this, but after a brief surf of their contents the impression I’m getting is that sadly the agenda that MTR is peddling may well be becoming more accepted by the mainstream than just at the fringes where I think her ideas belong.

Remesh is a devotee of Sahaja Yoga and from my personal experience, many of these Yoga groups can be conservative on a number of issues. I would expect his values to be informed by conservative Indian patriarchal values.

Probably something to do with his connection to Sahaja Yoga Meditation because some people think that it is a cult. I’m not particularly sure whether we need to go into the stuff that’s out there talking on the one hand about kundalinis and other such dubiously mystical sounding explanations, or whether Remesh Manocha’s research really proves anything or not. I suspect it’s true that meditation is useful, but rare that it is “sold separately” so to speak.

The real point I suppose I’d make here is just that it is relatively divergent from the other beliefs that we know inform many people who hold exceedingly grave concerns for child rearing in the modern day.

Stop it HG.You’ll give people swollen heads!
I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
People are a wake up to this blancmange.
Even if they corner the ‘readily gullible’ market so be it.
It keeps the sheep off the vege patch.

The social media will snuff out the false prophets soon enough.Peer pressure will drive the final nails in.

Young people are beginning to see the price of freedom, more often than not, means turning their back on all forms of mass marketing which includes ‘gurus’ of all kinds.

A new Bhagwan will rise up to counter any prudish landslide, and Mother Nature has a habit of kicking in at hormone time, anyway.
You’d have to be an optimist to think too many young people look more favourably at religion these days given church sex abuse,Middle east wars,the USA’s pseudo religious addiction to gun-power etc.

I don’t know Hypo. I think social media can be reductive. The short form gives rise to very dismissive commentary at times, and I doubt this lack of nuance gives rise to a better appreciation of the viewpoints they’re reflecting upon.

Then again the reflexive nature of a compressed thought may betray people’s true character at times. Certainly the shallow end of the pool seems overcrowded to me! If upon the point of having so many people yelling at one another to “F**k OFF!!!” that most have forgotten why they’re were at odds in the first place then have we really achieved a marketplace of ideas or just a willingness to exchange hostilities?

Sure I know that the whole of social media isn’t like that or I wouldn’t participate, but you have to admit that as exchanges go twitter in particular leaves something to be desired.

I hear what you are saying,but I think peer stuff still has a gravitational impact.It’s the new God, but it isn’t mine.The lawyers will love where it leads.That is where our fastest job creation will be.Sorting out the mess that instant freedom of speech is delivering.Bags not exploding my head on how they get this Genie back in its bottle.
Can-O-Worms.

Yes well I think legally perhaps it is time to say that we should simply learn to respond by ignoring the offence that is created on-line. There’s too much of it anyway, and most is already ignored. If people have the right to cull whatever they find personally offensive from their own social media realms then I think that’s probably enough.

As for being a new God, well I suspect we ought to know by now that any such imprimatur spells the beginning of the end for all forms of self expression. Perhaps its just the latest, and not quite greatest, conduit for self expression in a world where for many people such things had been hitherto inconceivable. That’s quite enough for any technology to achieve, don’t you think?

“In this pornified world, with sexual messaging hitting them in their faces the minute they wake up in the morning, and given the assumption that most young people are having sex and that those who aren’t must have something wrong with them, these findings are revealing.”

Sexual messaging hitting them in their faces the minute they wake up in the morning!!!

Oh really? The minute they wake up? The minute?

Yes, the findings are revealing. They reveal you don’t know what you are talking about.

But the bit I liked the best was the concern over girls getting drunk and having sex. Like that is a wholly new phenomenon and adult women never mix sex and alcohol.

I’m pretty sure I saw the clip earlier and was less struck by the “first offence” idea, but now that you put it in that context it does make a lot of sense.

Overall I liked it so much that I figure not to trust what she’s saying because it has to be too good to be true. Some of it makes use of quasi new age cum some kind of hippy language I’m not entirely enthusiastic about, but she’s looking to express something I don’t know that we have better words for so I’ll partially excuse it I guess. The real source of what I suspect to be something of an error in her theory, would be that she seems to think she has an “answer” that might apply to all women. I’m not sure anyone gets to tell “all women” what’s good for them, least of all me🙂

Yes, those same parts made be uncomfortable too. I was moved by her story. Lying topless in the summer heat, enjoying the sensuousness of the breeze and grass on her skin, only to be yelled at and shamed. I can just as readily imagine it being MTR herself.

Trying to dig up any memory whatsoever of when it must have been inn my own case I unfortunately came up blank. I suspect it may be the same for my others and part of the insidious nature of how these taboo memes are perpetuated. If we’re inculcated with it so young as to have forgotten then these sensibilities seem almost natural as if they were always there.

Your article (how many times must we warn people against reading The Australian), referred indirectly to “the dangers” of sexting, (apparently it might lead to dancing).

Surely if enough people are doing it then it is eventually destined to become commonplace and will therefore tend to break down the level of prurient interest we have in such things. Personally I can’t see what’s supposed to be so wrong with it anyway.

Hehehe
Gladly, I don’t read the Australian.I came across the story elsewhere and re-searched for it on the broader net and that is what I got.
Only the really keen ‘mega-motivated misandric missionaries’ with multiple millions of dollars and a squadron of magic wands, will trump the ever expanding interweb and other social media, and as I said if youth have a choice between doing what they want,what their peers expect and what God Botherers and BINTs imagine they want, (given most of the fears of the BACWAs are based on self created scenarios or personal projections) I know which horse I would back.That’s not to say we should not keep banging on the ‘show us the proof’ drum in the meantime.The ‘independent’ truth thing is where all moralistic crusaders fall flat on their face.

You may not think anything is wrong with it, and the majority probably agree, but remember there are incessant naggers pulverising the keyboards on their PC’s as they harass every level of media they can, to save the youth from any non-church approved pre-marital sex with the toxic penile warriors.Perhaps the Arsetralian just goes along for some occasional respite from the cacophony?